“While Congress has great latitude to create statutory schemes like Fisa, it may not hang a cloak of secrecy over the constitution.”
~Judge Richard Leon
• Dragnet ‘likely’ in breach of fourth amendment
• Judge describes scope of program as ‘Orwellian’
• Ruling relates to collection of Americans’ metadata
• Read the full ruling here
Spencer Ackerman and Dan Roberts
The Guardian [UK]
16 December 2013
The National Security Agency received its most significant legal setback since the disclosures prompted by a former contractor, Edward Snowden, when a federal judge ruled on Monday that its bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records is likely to violate the US constitution.
Judge Richard Leon declared that the mass collection of so-called metadata probably violates the fourth amendment, relating to unreasonable searches and seizures, and is “almost Orwellian” in its scope.
Leon wrote that James Madison, the architect of the US Constitution, would be “aghast” at the scope of the NSA’s collection on Americans’ communications data.
He also expressed doubt about the central rationale for the program cited by the NSA: that it is necessary for preventing terrorist attacks. “The government does not cite a single case in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent terrorist attack,” wrote Leon, a US district judge in the District of Columbia…
…”The almost-Orwellian technology that enables the government to store and analyze the phone metadata of every telephone user in the United States is unlike anything that could have been conceived in 1979,” he wrote, referring to the year in which the US supreme court ruled on a fourth amendment case on which the NSA now relies to justify the bulk records program…
The entire article is at The Guardian.
Also at the site, NSA goes on 60 Minutes: the definitive facts behind CBS’s flawed report Our take on five things the spy agency would like the public to believe about its vast surveillance powers.
…Reporter John Miller, a former official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and an ex-FBI spokesman, allowed these claims to go unchallenged. The Guardian, not so much. Here’s our take…
Related: Sen. Rand Paul Applauds the Protection of Fourth Amendment Rights
Update: From August, Oliver Stone: ‘Obama is a snake and we have to turn on him’
…“It’s never about terrorists, it always becomes about the way J. Edgar Hoover did it,” he said. “He brought all the weight of government to bear against protestors. He didn’t like protestors. He thought they were left-wing communists. He never could find the proof, but by the time the Vietnam War came around, as you know, 500,000 people were on the list, and they were being eavesdropped on. And where are we now? Same place.”…
